A Time for Prose, a special event sponsored by the CUNY Graduate Center Poetics Group, will address the present of avant-garde prose, along with essential related questions: why experimental prose seems eternally suspended between narrative and language, between affect and the social, between history and the present. Montreal novelist and essayist Gail Scott will present “The Sutured Subject,” followed by responses from New York writers Douglas A. Martin and Rachel Levitsky. The conversation will address the influences on contemporary prose of such writers as Victor Shklovsky, Kathy Acker, Renée Gladman, Taylor Brady, the New Narrative group (Robert Glück, Camille Roy, Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian), and the Language poets.
Friday, November 14th, 6 pm – 8 pm
The CUNY Graduate Center.
365 Fifth Avenue @ 34th Street, New York NY
Room 9206
Biographical Information
Gail Scott is the author of five works of fiction, including My Paris, which was named one of the top ten Canadian novels of 1999 by Quill and Quire and was published in the US by Dalkey Archive Press (2003). Her essays, in English and French, are collected in Spaces Like Stairs and la théorie, un dimanche. She is a co-founder of Narrativity, an online journal of contemporary experimental narrative, and she also co-edited — along with Robert Glück, Mary Burger, and Camille Roy — Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (Coach House, 2004). Gail Scott teaches Creative Writing at Université de Montréal but is currently living in New York while she completes a novel and works on a new collection of stories. Her essay “The Sutured Subject” will appear in the fall issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction.
Rachel Levitsky is the author of five chapbooks of poetry and Under the Sun, her first full length volume, published by Futurepoem books in 2003. She also writes poetry plays, three of which (one with Camille Roy) have been performed in New York and San Francisco. Levitsky founded Belladonna, a publisher and series of events, in August 1999. She teaches at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
Douglas A. Martin is a poet, novelist and short story writer whose first full-length prose work, Outline of My Lover, was selected as an International Book of the Year in The Times Literary Supplement. His most recent books are Your Body Figured, which consists of three novellas, and In the Time of Assignments, a collection of poetry. Martin is currently a visiting professor at Wesleyan University.